This blog is the rough copy of my notes about a little fictional world I created. Over the years, I’ve manufactured a lot of information for this planet, so this page serves to consolidate the most basic things one would need to know about Areios Pagos, the Rock of Aries:

* Areios is named for the Greek god of War Aries (on account of its blood-red atmosphere) and is located in a solar system somewhere in another galaxy.

* Areios is a terrestrial planet much like Earth, but is between 2.5 to 3 times the mass of Earth, and has only about 1.25-1.4 times its radius.

* Areios orbits a star called Hemera, a dimmer and smaller K-type star named for the Greek personification of Day.

* Hemera is about 70% of our Sun’s mass and glows with an orange hue. It will shine as a main sequence star for 38 billion years before going supernova.

* Areios orbits at about half an astronomical unit (AU) from Hemera, where an AU is defined as the average distance of the Earth from the Sun (about 93 million miles).

* Areios has some large seas and one ocean, but land covers most of the planet. It has about the same amount of water as the Earth, but because of its enlarged size, water takes up a smaller percent of the surface.

* Areios rotates on its side like Uranus, so it experiences months of uninterrupted sunlight in the summer, months of uninterrupted darkness in the winter, and equal lengths of light and dark in spring and fall.

* Areios has three moons; two of them will fly off into space one day, but one of them will hit the Roche limit of the planet and get torn apart by Areios’ gravity, producing a ring.

* Areios is more volcanically active than Earth and experiences frequent eruptions and moderate earthquake activity.

* Because of its greater mass, Areios’ atmosphere is denser than the Earth’s atmosphere.

* Because it spins faster than Earth (due to it’s size and proximity to its star), Areios has more a more turbulent atmosphere and more violent weather than on Earth.

* Areios is home to strange life that is perfectly suited to this environment; there are no plants on this world, but bacteria do some photosynthesis to create oxygen for complex life forms.

* Oxygen levels never reach as high on Areios as on Earth, so creatures don’t end up as big as on Earth, since oxygen levels on Earth correlate with how big a creature could become.

* Also the greater mass of the planet means a more aggressive gravitational pull keeps any organism from growing to big, or it might buckle underneath its own weight.

* Areios’ bigger mantle takes longer to cool, so at first Areios doesn’t have a magnetic field. This means radiation strips away at the early atmosphere, and sterilizes the land surface for a while. Eventually a magnetic field does form and protects life from dangerous particles emitted by Hemera.

* Areios’ tectonic plates get pushed faster than the ones on Earth, so the ocean floor is created and destroyed much quicker. This process also takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, so there is less of a greenhouse gas effect at first. Once life arises, bacteria and later complex organisms manipulate the atmosphere to make it more habitable.